Monday, September 29, 2014

Gibraltar: a brief guide to the Rock

My first impressions of Gibraltar were not, to be honest, very good ones. We had grabbed dinner at a restaurant in Casemates Square which was pretty ordinary, with poor service and, on a walk through the town after sunset, I noted that Main Street seemed to be populated entirely by groups of young men somewhat the worse for drink. It was a mite intimidating, and seemingly under-policed.

However, Monday morning dawned bright and sunny, and we had a tour arranged by the Gibraltar Tourism Board to look forward to. Our guide, and driver, Ajessa collected us and showed us some of the sights, telling us a bit about Gibraltar and answering our questions. Europa Point, at the southern tip, is just fifteen miles from Morocco, and we talked about some of the challenges whilst we looked around.

And then, a flash of movement in the water below, and we noticed that there were dolphins leaping out of the water in pursuit of shoals of anchovies, close to the shoreline, so we stopped to watch them for a while. Given that the waters around Gibraltar are some of the busiest in the world, with huge tankers and container vessels passing through all the time, I hadn't expected such a sight.

No tour of Gibraltar would be complete without the Rock itself, with its siege tunnels and the incredible underground complex that was built to defend Gibraltar during World War II, and we were given a brief talk about the tunnels by one of the local guides, who turned out somewhat unexpectedly to be German.

There was time to meet a macaque, and a quick dash around the rest of the territory, before we were returned to our apartment with a rather better impression of gibraltar than we had started with.

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